Fairy tales have transfixed readers for thousands of years, and for many reasons; one of the most compelling is the promise of a magical home. How many architects, young and old, have been inspired by a hero or heroine who must imagine new realms and new spaces — new ways of being in this strange world? Houses in fairy tales are never just houses; they always contain secrets and dreams.
— Places Journal

"The Butterfly Dream" by Bernheimer Architecture is the third and final installment of this year's Fairy Tale Architecture series, curated by writer Kate Bernheimer and architect Andrew Bernheimer. ⠀ The team imagined the butterfly in Zhuangzi's famous parable as a drone, collecting data which... View full entry

It was the theme of nesting that primarily fascinated us about the Koschei tale, as it corresponded with ideas of sectional nesting that we have exploited as an architectural technique for generating spatial intricacy - LTL Architects.
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Our holiday series on fairy tale architecture returns this week with three new features, curated by writer Kate Bernheimer and architect Andrew Bernheimer. ⠀⠀First up: in "The Death of Koschei the Deathless," LTL Architects examine the strange habits of a fearful man who sought to escape his... View full entry

In the construction of the new Yugoslavia, modernist thinking and design were deployed to guide the country’s rapid urbanization and industrialization as well as to unify the ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse population.
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In columnist Belmont Freeman's latest article for Places, he examines the exhibition “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980,” now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and finds a rigorous and revealing survey of Yugoslavia’s extraordinary built... View full entry

Gordon Matta-Clark’s inventive site-specific cuts into abandoned buildings demonstrated approaches to the concept of home and to the market system of real estate that were anarchistic, creatively destructive, and full of queer promise.
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In "Unbuilding Gender," Jack Halberstam extends the ideas of unbuilding and creative destruction that characterize Gordon Matta-Clark's work to develop a queer concept of anarchitecture focused on the trans* body. Halberstam is the 2018 recipient of the Arcus/Places Prize for innovative public... View full entry

Follow the intricate supply chains of architecture and you’ll find not just product manufacturers but also environmental polluters. Keep going and you’ll find as well the elusive networks of political influence that are underwritten by the billion-dollar construction industry.
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In "What You Don't See," Brent Sturlaugson examines the supply chains of architecture to make the case that designers must expand their frameworks of action and responsibility for thinking about sustainability. Unraveling the networks of materials, energy, power, and money that must be... View full entry

"Along with their monumental role in Rome's urban fabric, the architectural status of fountains has long been uncertain. It can be hard to determine when they ceased to be viewed as public water utilities, and came to be regarded as purely artistic objects."
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In the same week in 2016, a group of tourists were denounced as trespassers for splashing around in one of Rome's historic fountains, while Fendi was praised for its tribute to Italy's artistic legacy by staging a fashion show across another. Anatole Tchikine is prompted by these contrasting... View full entry

For too long, the issues of gender, disability, and user-centeredness have been relegated to the far margins of architectural history.
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Places columnist Barbara Penner uncovers a parallel narrative to the rise of flexible home design — often attributed to a handful of progressive postwar designers — in the history of home economics. She explores the flexible domestic spaces created by designers such as Lillian Moller... View full entry

As hospice design becomes more formally ambitious — and standardized — we should remember there is no universal model for ‘dying well.’
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What is the ideal setting for the end of life? The dominant templates of the mid-century mega-hospital and the domestic hospice set the rational spaces of medical institutions against the familiarity of home. Yet, we are increasingly seeing hybrid forms that deviate from these two distinct... View full entry

Architectural representations often embody the tension between familiar and unfamiliar. In an effective rendering, the new buildings or landscapes share the same illusionistic space with images of existing buildings or landscapes, producing an almost exquisite confusion between real and unreal.
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Architectural renderings are not photographs; or are they? Susan Piedmont-Palladino examines the hyper-real imagined worlds of contemporary architectural drawings through theories of the uncanny, and considers the disconcerting effect that occurs when "we can't quite sort out the relationship of... View full entry

Geography is getting stranger: the map is breaking up. Now we need to attend to the unnatural places, the escape zones and gap spaces, the places that are sites of surprise but also of bewilderment and unease.
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Negotiating the hostile architectures of the modern city — from the anti-pedestrian cobbles of a median strip to the unloved landscape of a traffic island — geographer Alistair Bonnett reflects on the increasingly disciplinarian nature of public space, and by crossing roads and planting... View full entry

Taking a photograph of architecture by using a camera is tantamount to placing a small architecture against another large architecture and having the small one swallow the larger one.
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The Japanese word for buildings, tatemono, means “things that are standing.” On the occasion of a major career retrospective at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Naoya Hatakeyama considers the meaning and the practice of photographing the built environment, and the distinction between the... View full entry

Concepts like “making room for the river,” which works well in the Netherlands, can mean mass evictions in the Global South. Too often, the rhetoric of climate adaptation is doublespeak for the displacement of poor communities, and an alibi for unsustainable growth.
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As coastal megacities adapt to climate change, they often bring in outside planning experts who push highly engineered, technocratic resilience programs. Lizzie Yarina looks at how this trend is affecting local communities in Bangkok, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Jakarta, and argues that... View full entry

There is a good case for listing Thomas Hardy amongst the greatest of all conceptual architects — the prophet, well before the fact, of a particular type of speculative, imaginary architectural project which would boom a century later.
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The 19th-century author Thomas Hardy has never been considered much of an architect. Yet as Kester Rattenbury shows, his creation of Wessex was an architectural project - one that drew on the ideas of his time, but also predicted some of the most inventive architectural work of our own age. Hardy... View full entry

“Away with universal styles,” wrote Josef Frank. “Away with the idea of equating art and industry, away with the whole system that has become popular under the name of functionalism. Modernism," he was fond of saying, "is that which gives us complete freedom."
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More than an architect and designer, Josef Frank was an “intellectual, who built ideas.” Christopher Long introduces Frank's 1958 essay, "Accidentism" — a humanist manifesto denouncing the banality of orthodox modernism and calling for a new pluralism in design. As Long explains, "the essay... View full entry

The council housing designed 50 years ago for a progressive London borough remains a potent symbol of the achievements of postwar social democracy.
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Prompted by Mark Swenarton's recent book, Cook's Camden, Douglas Murphy looks at the radically experimental public housing estates built by the London borough from 1966 to 1975, and the reevaluation of these extraordinary projects currently underway in our own era of unaffordable cities and... View full entry